The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) has commissioned a pilot project to plug leakage of piped water supply in the city and roped in a private firm to conduct survey.
Disclosing this to presspersons the Minister for BWSSB S. Suresh Kumar on Tuesday said that, Larson and Toubro (L&T) had been asked to conduct the study on the source of Unaccounted Water Connections (UWC) and suggest remedies to plug the leakage of water.
Water leakage had posed a challenge and BWSSB was not getting of account of over 35 to 40 per cent of water being used in the city. “This leakage has been causing huge revenue loss to BWSSB”, he noted.
To find a permanent solution to the problem, BWSSB asked L&T to commission a pilot project, which would cover six Assembly constituencies including, Basavanagudi, Chamarajpet, Padmanabhanagar, Jayagar, BTM Layout and Bangalore South. The project would be completed in 18 months, he said.
Noting that public taps, illegal connections and leakage were the three primary source of water loss, he said, the study would measure the total supply to each metering area and revenue collection in each month.
The work on surveying the household connections, quality of existing pipelines and sources of leakage in every ward of the six constituencies had commenced and BWSSB would get initial report shortly, he said.
The aim of commissioning project was to tract unaccounted water supply and take steps to reduce the leakage to 20 per cent. Water crisis in Bangalore city would be eased by bringing down the quantum of leakage and employees of BWSSB were also being trained to plug leakage of unaccounted water, he added.
Before launching pilot project, an experiment of kind had been made in Bannappa Park area. As a result BWSSB could bring down the leakage of water to 20 per cent, he said.
Following the outcome of the project commissioned, similar kind of survey would be commissioned in all the 28 Assembly constituencies in Bangalore, he said.
GWWASP
The Greater Bangalore Water and Sanitation Project (GBWSAP) chalked out in 2005 to add areas under seven City Municipal Councils and one Town Municipal Council was progress fast. Besides testing leakages, work on repairing pipelines under the project was on. These areas would get water supply shortly, he said.